Russian State Media Focuses Attacks on Kerry’s Spokeswoman

The rhetorical sniping between Russian and American officials over the separatist uprisings in Ukraine appeared to escalate a notch this week when state television channels controlled by the Kremlin devoted an unusual amount of time to reporting on, and so amplifying, recent attacks by Russian bloggers on a State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki.

The first of those errors came at a State Department briefing on April 10, when Ms. Psaki was asked about Russian threats to cut off supplies of natural gas to Ukraine. At one point in her reply, she briefly reversed the direction in which Russian pipelines run, saying: “There are flows of gas, of natural gas I should say, that go through — from Western Europe through Ukraine to Russia, and we — or I’m sorry, the other way — from Russia through Ukraine to Western Europe.”

Although she had quickly corrected herself before the error was pointed out, supporters of Russian policy in Ukraine eagerly shared video of just that portion of her statement as apparently incontrovertible evidence that Americans are lacking in basic knowledge of the region.

A second error came more than a month later, when Ms. Psaki read aloud a list of State Department objections to a referendum in Donetsk conducted by pro-Russia separatists that included “reports of carousel voting.” Asked by an Associated Press reporter to explain what that term meant, Ms. Psaki was forced to admit that she did not know.

Given that carousel voting is a term used to describe a form of cheating said to be common during elections in Russia — in which claques of voters are bused from polling station to polling station to cast ballots multiple times — there was a certain unexamined irony in Russians boasting that an American official was unfamiliar with the practice. After Vladimir V. Putin’s United Russia party dominated the 2011 parliamentary elections that the opposition called rigged, a journalist working undercover for the formerly independent news site Lenta published a detailed account of taking part in one such carousel, organized by Mr. Putin’s supporters.

The general theme of the online attacks, that American officials like Ms. Psaki are ignorant of the facts on the ground in Ukraine, was even made the focus of an entire segment of Russian television’s main news broadcast on Sunday, presented by the influential anchorman Dmitry Kiselyov.

Mr. Kiselyov, who reminded Americans in March that Russia is still “the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S.A. into radioactive dust,” is no fringe commentator. He was chosen by the Russian president late last year to lead a new official news agency charged with explaining Kremlin policy to the world.

As the Moscow correspondent for Buzzfeed, Max Seddon, reported, Mr. Kiselyov, speaking in front of a huge photograph of the State Department spokeswoman during Sunday’s broadcast, claimed that her misstatements had led Russian bloggers to coin the term “Psaking,” which he called “a new buzzword that has appeared on the spaces of the global Internet.”

Although Mr. Seddon suggested that the supposedly viral term had gained little traction outside the world of pro-Kremlin bloggers, according to Mr. Kiselyov, the word was fast becoming common parlance online, used “when someone makes a dogmatic statement about something they don’t understand, mixes facts up, and then doesn’t apologize.”

In the days after that broadcast, when Ms. Psaki failed to appear at briefings in Washington, Russian bloggers eagerly spread the rumor that she had been fired. She was, in fact, accompanying her boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, on a trip to France to meet his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, for talks aimed at decreasing tensions over Ukraine.

Among the Russian accounts promoting the idea that Ms. Psaki had lost her job was that of ANNA, an obscure news agency based in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia, which was apparently set up in 2011 to provide coverage sympathetic to Syrian government forces. In recent months, ANNA, which brought at least one former member of Russian military intelligence to Syria, has shifted its attention from glorifying President Bashar al-Assad’s troops to providing live-stream video coverage of armed, pro-Russia separatists in Ukraine.

As the rumor gained traction, however, it led some Russians to deploy the hashtag #SavePsaki, promoting an apparently sarcastic campaign on Twitter to restore the spokeswoman to her position.

Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, insisted in an email on Friday that the attacks on Ms. Psaki were aimed at blunting criticism of Russian involvement in Ukraine. “This is yet another in a long line of desperate attacks to counter efforts by senior U.S. officials to speak the truth about Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its ongoing involvement in eastern Ukraine,” he wrote. “We will not be deterred by these kind of bully tactics.”

While she declined to comment on the Internet campaign against her, Ms. Psaki did post tweets in Englishand Russian saying that reports of her demise had been greatly exaggerated, and suggested that the campaign against her was part of an effort by “the Russian propaganda machine” to demonize her for supporting “a strong, democratic Ukraine.”